3D Classics reviews: 3D Altered Beast

Ahh, Altered Beast. I had such a love-hate relationship with this game back in the day.

Ultimately, I loved the game on my Mega Drive, but had a massive hatred for how difficult the game seemed to get on the third level.

So was forking out over £4 for an old game with 3D visuals really worth it? Let’s do this!

Ooh you have the 3D-ness

Unlike Space Harrier, I don’t think the 3D adds quite as much to Altered Beast. The 3D looks pretty good, with items in the background and foreground offering the illusion of depth, but it hasn’t changed the game for me the way Space Harrier did.

I think though, being such an old arcade game and one of the earliest Mega Drive games, it must have been a bit tricky for SEGA to really push the 3D visuals – you don’t have quite the same parallaxing backdrops some later games offered, or even the advanced enemy attacks. It’s ultimately a pretty basic game.

Additional features

“Everything gets the kick!”

Ok, now this is where I feel 3D Altered Beast perks up a bit. The optional settings you can go through, will change the gameplay a bit, but there is one particular feature that I am so happy with – the ability to have random beasts on each level.

I mentioned at the start how I used to hate how difficult the game became around level 3. Well that was because of the beast you were given. Level 1 had the classic Wolf, level 2 had the epic Dragon (who, let’s face it was too good) and then level 3 you had the Bear … the bear was crap.

It was kind of slow, it had the ridiculously short-ranged breath attack and then the weirdly difficult to control spinning, jumping, roll attack. Well it was fine against the standard enemies, but the boss battle, I always found too hard with the bear.

My friends and I never seemed to be able to get past the 3rd level boss using the bear – luckily we found a cheat that allowed you to choose each beast for each level (oh yeah, that was a good one) and we could beat that boss easily with ANY other beast.

Argh! The Bear and the 3rd boss – my Altered Beast Achilles heel!

Sorry, I’ve gone off on a tangent. The random beast option – basically with this selected, you never know what beast you are going to turn in to on each level and more often you are a different beast to what the level default should be – meaning that I (almost) never have to fight the 3rd level boss with the bear! Yes!

[And just to note, I can defeat any other boss with the bear – just not the 3rd one… weird, no?]

So I’m so happy this option exists. Plus there’s a variety of other options for gamers to select…

Gameplay for the AGES

Ahh the Dragon. Possibly the most over-powered character/special/upgrade in gaming history. Love it.

I'm the European Editor of SEGA Nerds and co-founder of the original SEGA Nerds website with Chris back in 2004 or 2005 (genuinely can't remember which year it was now!).
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